> As radical as they might seem, calls for limits on wealth are as old as civilization itself.
Well, knowing that, one could reasonably wonder why they never succeed. Could it be something about human nature that prevents utopias and good intentions from working as planned?
They make the mistake of thinking the government will do a better job than individuals. When the government is often stacked with the most useless, theiving sacks of lazy crap in society and should be atleast as big a concern as any rich person.
they also confuse the negative effects of market power abuse caused wealth accumulation and wealth accumulation from improving the production possibilities frontier. we have laws called antitrust to stop the former we just need to use them a lot more like we used to post ww2 and pre 1970s. Damping the latter wealth accumulation is a really dumb idea and should be avoided.
theirideas on ingeritance tax is honestly just naive. They will capture a bunch of the upper middle class guys and the really wealthy will avoid it, as they always do. What that type of inheritance tax will do is fossilize the ultra wealthy and everhbody else
From what I hear, wealth above $50M-$100M is really only useful for status or power. Once you've hit that level you're able to buy pretty much anything material that makes life nicer: a second house, a yacht, servants, a private jet, et cetera.
People have identified the private jet as the most expensive thing a person can buy that substantially improves your life.
Beyond that point it's more of a status game than real improvement. Yes, a 200ft yacht is nicer than a 50ft yacht, but the difference is marginal. The 7th house isn't adding much.
As a marketing term I like "Limitarianism"
Do they mention how would they build walls and fund military power to prevent people from fleeing their utopia?
"Among a representative sample of Dutch people, for example, Robeyns and her team found that nine out of ten respondents agreed that having wealth exceeding €4 million for a family of four — in terms of ownership of certain assets, such as a mansion, a second home, luxury vehicles and a specific amount of savings — qualifies as being super-rich. In low-income countries, that threshold could be much lower."
Interesting to learn that limitarianism is an ideology that respects national borders.
Nobody needs more than a billion dollars. Nobody even needs more than 10 million dollars.
But that isn't really the question(s). The real questions are:
1. Can you morally take what others have, just because they have more than enough? By what standard of morality? And, given that "don't take other peoples' stuff" has worked out pretty well as a standard of morality, what justification is there for choosing a different one?
2. More broadly, there will be collateral damage from any approach to take wealth from the wealthy. Will that collateral damage leave society better or worse off than the status quo?
Probably the most minimalistic way to do it would be a progressive tax on wealth above 10 million dollars. But even that would lead to massive attempts to hide assets (or get them out of the country), and more and more invasive attempts to detect such things. And the invasiveness itself is damaging to society.
I don't mind wealth disparities. I don't like idiots who just tricked the system in some way. We should not reward antisocial behavior. This is how countries and empires fall. From Rome to China.
'Robeyns, who has studied how people perceive wealth, opens with a provocative proposal — governments should set a wealth limit on the order of 10 million euros or US dollars per person.'
So people with wealth close to $10mil should keep all their money in cash and avoid higher-return investments, since the the excess above $10mil would be confiscated? Besides being morally wrong, that would discourage investment.
There’s certainly some strange effects on the edges, for example founders/early investors never realizing their gains and instead just taking loans collateralized with their assets (that’s how hyperrich avoid income taxes: just don’t have any taxable income)
You cannot functionally limit wealth. Does 10 million include assets? What about company ownership? If a piece of art is worth more than 10 million, does it need to be owned by more than one person? Does it need to be cut in two?
If something you own appreciates and your wealth increases as a result, how quickly before you have to divest that asset?
What about non profit organizations? What about IP? What about software? When Minecraft was sold by a single owner, it was worth 10 million many, many times over. When exactly would it have been necessary for him to sell his company, and who would he have been obligated to sell it to?
Money and power are fungible (caveat heavy transaction costs).
If you eliminate the ability to build colossal wealth you leave open only the option to pursue significant power.
Doing so will... not turn out well.
I love the conversation going here. A bunch of socialist and communist nerds fantasize that they could build something better than what existing socialism and communism countries have done.
Try harder.
Communists did one smart thing: they limited maximum earnings of party members(in theory). You want to have political power? Limit your incomes, share with the state.
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Extremely logical - after a certain point, wealth is just meaningless numbers in financial computers, only expressed as the control of major organizations like corporations. Its literal unbounded power. We limited the power of kings and dukes. But we are allowing the same kind of power to those who hoard imaginary wealth that cannot be spent on actual things - it cannot be spent on actual things, because it is estimated that the amount of wealth stored in Swiss banks (leave aside derivatives etc) have already surpassed multiple times of the value of everything on the planet. So there is wealth on the planet that can buy the entire planet dozens of times over. And yet hoarding continues at great cost to the society.